Customers

Right now, about 2 percent of the contact center infrastructure market uses Software as a Service, said inContact CEO Paul Jarman, citing research by Gartner. That statistic seems reasonable, given that the contact center infrastructure space has traditionally been dominated by on-premise players --...

Every small vendor -- no matter the industry -- dreams of landing at least one big name Fortune 500 client. Such a client, of course, would lend it the necessary street cred -- not to mention revenue -- that all smaller companies need. It also might open the door to new product development and distr...

The dismal state of the economy is causing companies everywhere to reassess their marketing budgets to ensure that they're allocating their limited marketing funds in the most productive ways possible. In many cases, this means curtailing, postponing or even eliminating previously planned marketing ...

It's been four months since Google announced it would guarantee 99.9 percent system accessibility for users of its Google Apps Premier Edition -- a cloud-based productivity suite of business-oriented messaging and collaboration apps, including integration capabilities and support. At the time, it se...

This year promises to be one of the most challenging in recent memory for online retail. The strategies and tactics that online retailers have relied upon in the past will not work in this harsher, new consumer climate. This year will clearly separate winners from losers. Winners will have the wisdo...

By any measure, SaaS vendor RightNow Technologies closed the year on a high note, completing seven million-dollar-plus deals in the last quarter. In fact, CEO Greg Gianforte told CRM Buyer, "our sales teams delivered the highest total bookings in any quarter over the last two years. In the current e...

Recession. Nine letters you never want to see together in one word; at least not in that order. Sales and marketing departments across the globe are reeling from one of the worst financial crisis in recent business. The stock market is down, unemployment is climbing, and businesses are bracing fo...

Growing up in a world immersed in digital technologies, members of Generation Y have the highest of expectations on how they want to interact with their banks online. Born at the dawn of the digital age in the early 1980s, the oldest among Generation Y have never known a world without personal compu...

A computer company's research team puts their latest video up on Facebook rather than presenting it during a technical conference. A video game developer turns to Twitter to first break the news of a new release to the masses. A salesperson stays in touch with all professional relationships -- colle...

The recession is ahead of our thinking about how to sell around it. Our first response is a tried and true strategy that is not right for all occasions. People will disagree with me, but so far we've seen a steady stream of one idea -- staying close to the customer and attending to the customer expe...

It should come as no surprise that Maurice Ramirez -- an emergency room attending physician with Florida Hospital's Flagler division -- is in favor of widespread adoption of automated personal health records, or PHRs. Ramirez was once chief medical officer for a company that was developing such an a...

Society's expectations for more personalized products and services have risen. As a result, vendors need to better understand their customers and prospects in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. One of the best ways for a company to do this is to spend time examining the interactions bet...

Genesys has always been a distinct entity within the Alcatel-Lucent line of divisions, products and services. On Jan. 1, though, it was folded into a larger group called the "Applications Software Group." Genesys' mission of offering contact center products and services geared toward enterprises and...

The home-agent contact center model has undergone a metamorphosis in the last few years. A few short years ago, it was the refuge of small companies that couldn't afford to outsource operations to typical brick-and-mortar contact centers, said Alpine CEO Christopher Carrington. However, larger compa...

Chris Formant, president of Avaya Global Services, has been on the job since March 2008. It is no small irony that one year ago he was tasked with the assignment of strengthening the services group's financial and operating performance -- a significant undertaking, given that the services division t...